Hey folks! I am proud to announce the Workshop on Unsolved Problems in Social Robot Navigation, held at the Robotics, Science and Systems Conference in the Netherlands (roboticsconference.org). We are scheduled for 130 pm and will have several talks, spotlight papers, a poster session and discussion.
I'm an organizer for this one, but I'll only be able to attend virtually due to my manager (me) telling me I'm already going to enough conferences this year, which I am. So I will be managing the virtual Zoom, which you can sign up for at our website: https://unsolvedsocialnav.org/
After that, hopefully the next things on my plate will only be Dragon Con, Milford and 24 Hour Comics Day!
-the Centaur
Pictured: Again, from the archives, until I fix the website backend.
Wow, what a year. I'd love to say it had its pros and cons, but the stark reality of it is that the one bad thing - getting laid off, not just years before I wanted to retire, but one day after we successfully showed our new project was working, thus throwing me years off course in my research - overshadows all the good stuff. As I was describing it to my wife, it's like falling down into a well and finding some shiny rocks down there. They might be nice rocks - heck, they might even be gold, and worth a fortune - but you've still got to cope with falling into the well, and figure out how to climb back out again, before taking advantage of the good stuff.
But 2023 was the worst year for me for a while. There have been bad ones recently - in 2016 we elected a wannabe dictator and many of my friends and family seemed to lose their minds; in 2019 my mother died; and in 2020 I had the double whammy of the pandemic with the most stressful period of my work life. But, like 2023, each of those years had ups with the downs: in 2016, my current research thread started; in 2019, we proved that our research ideas were working (for all the good it did us); and in 2020, we moved back to my hometown into what we hope is our forever home.
And yet, with the exception of the loss of my mother, none of those seemed quite as life changing as getting laid off. Even for Mom, I was somewhat prepared: my father had unexpectedly lost one of his siblings early, and our extended family had developed a kind of shared knowledge of how to cope with loss. I had already lost my father and grandmother, and knew that Mom, while healthy, was in her mid-80s, and could pass at any time; so I was spending as much time as practical with her. I spoke to her the day she died. And so, after she was gone, I started down a road that I had been preparing for mentally for a long, long time.
But I wasn't in the mindset that Google would kill off half its robotics program just in AI's hour of triumph. We were even working on a projects directly related to Google's new large language model focus. It made no sense, and left this strange kind of void, creating a severance I didn't expect for another decade.
Despite all of what happened this year, I keep coming back to one thing:
Was it worth it if I wrote those two new stories?
Yes.
So, farewell, you crazy year you: thanks for all you gave me. My wife even said "Supposedly what you do on New Year's Eve is what you'll do for the rest of the year," and today we worked on our businesses, worked on writing and art, met friends old and new, and even moved furniture (which, metaphorically, is her new business venture). So's here's to more writing, more art, more friends, and more business in 2024!
-the Centaur
P.S. I see that I kept up "Blogging Every Day" in 2023 for 91 days, almost a quarter of the year; my earlier attempt at "Drawing Every Day" in 2021 lasted 103 days, a little over a quarter of the year. Let's see if we can break both those records in 2024, now that I have far more free time (and flexible time) on my hands!
So, I'm proud to announce my next venture: Logical Robotics, a robot intelligence firm focused on making learning robots work better for people. My research agenda is to combine the latest advances of deep learning with the rich history of classical artificial intelligence, using human-robot interaction research and my years of experience working on products and benchmarking to help robots make a positive impact.
Recent advances in large language model planning, combined with deep learning of robotic skills, have enabled almost magical developments in explainable artificial intelligence, where it is now possible to ask robots to do things in plain language and for the robots to write their own programs to accomplish those goals, building on deep learned skills but reporting results back in plain language. But applying these technologies to real problems will require a deep understanding of both robot performance benchmarks to refine those skills and human psychological studies to evaluate how these systems benefit human users, particularly in the areas of social robotics where robots work in crowds of people.
Logical Robotics will begin accepting new clients in May, after my obligations to my previous employer have come to a close (and I have taken a break after 17 years of work at the Search Engine That Starts With a G). In the meantime, I am available to answer general questions about what we'll be doing; if you're interested, please feel free to drop me a line at via centaur at logicalrobotics.com or take a look at our website.
